Sarah E. Dempsey, associate professor of communication in the College of Arts and Sciences and Institute for the Arts and Humanities fellow, on the forces that drive food politics
Sarah Dempsey grew up in a Michigan farming community, very aware of the importance of agriculture and the fact that food is a basic human need that is not equally available to everyone.
She began her career as a critical organizational communication scholar who studies the roles that organizations play in shaping our communities, including how we come to understand the world and our relationships to it and to one another. Food injustice issues quickly came to the forefront again. When Dempsey first came to Carolina in 2005, she participated in a cross-disciplinary collaboration with the Center for Integrating Research and Action that sought to conduct community-based research in partnership with North Carolinians. The collaborative was focused on addressing poverty, but hunger and food access kept coming up, because food is a key site of inequality.
Dempsey studies how the U.S. food system is organized in ways that lead to hunger and poverty and to the maintenance of a status quo in which these issues continue to be passed on over time.
What do you consider to be the most powerful forces in food politics? And, which changes are most needed to bring food justice?
DEMPSEY: One major force in our food system is food policy. The farm bill provides the rules we all eat by, and it creates an organizing force that affords resources to certain areas and not others.
Corporations are also important driving forces in food politics. Corporate consolidation has created a monopoly problem in the food system where we’ve seen fewer and fewer large companies dictating the rules for the food system, including setting wages and working conditions for food laborers.
So often hunger and wages are looked at as separate issues, but they aren’t. When we talk about hunger we are talking about poverty wages. The bitter irony here is that those who are involved most directly in food production and distribution often have the least access to food. The low wages of agricultural workers and food laborers are a big problem that needs to be addressed by employers and through policy change and collective action.
The U.S. food system is highly organized around a limited set of values that emphasize profit and efficiency rather than values like equity or justice. But I don’t ever want to give the impression that these issues can’t be fixed, because they can be. All we have to do is look at recent organizing by food chain workers, including the Fight for $15 coalition, farmworker movements like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and connected labor movements to draw inspiration for what can be done.
Photo courtesy of the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication
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